Comment by shadowdev1
19 hours ago
(cue arrogance) People on HackerNews complaining about Linux Desktop is pretty disappointing. You guys are supposed to be the real enthusiasts... you can make it work.
(cue superiority complex) I've been using Linux Desktop for over 10 years. It's great for literally everything. Gaming admittedly is like 8/10 for compatibility, but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windows or use CAD, etc. Seriously, ez.
Never had issues with NVIDIA GFX with any of the desktop cards. Laptops... sure they glitch out.
Originally Wine, then Proton, now Bazzite make it super easy to game natively. The only issues I ever had with games were from the Kernel level anti-cheats bundled. The anti-cheats just weren't available for Linux, so the games didn't start. Anyone familiar with those knows its not a linux thing, it's a publisher/anti-cheat mechanism thing. Just lazy devs really.
(cue opinionated anti-corporate ideology) I like to keep microsoft chained up in a VM where it belongs so can't do it's shady crap. Also with a VM you can do shared folders and clipboard. Super handy actually.
Weirdly enough, MacOS in a VM is a huge pita, and doesn't work well.
I have been working professionally on Linux for many years. But about once a year I have to reinstall the os because it craps out for various reasons. The same story goes for most of my team, but for some reason they seem ok with this. My issue with Linux is this: I don’t feel like a consumer, but a janitor. I don’t want this. Yes you can do whatever you want, but I don’t want to do those things. I want to write code and play games, not maintain the intricacies of a running computer.
For a server there is no better choice than Linux, but for my desktop/laptop, I find other alternatives better. Perhaps I haven’t found «the right distro», if so let me know, but until Linux is as low maintenance as windows or macos, it will be for those with an interest in doing that maintenance.
I realize I have a love-hate relationship with Linux. It is perfect, but flawed.
> I don’t feel like a consumer, but a janitor. I don’t want this.
I think it was Jorge Castro, the creator of Universal Blue, who called it the sysadmin culture. Most Linux distros are made by sysadmins for sysadmins, and you're expected to change and configure your system. I was a sysadmin myself for a long time. I used Slackware; switched from the 2.4 kernel to 2.6; tweaked CFLAGS on Gentoo; replaced SysV init with systemd; used PipeWire from the earliest versions - you name it, I did it.
Nowadays I use https://aeondesktop.github.io/ - an immutable system with Btrfs snapshots. Everything is installed from Flathub. The major roadblock is that much of the Linux world expects you to modify the system one way or another, so your mileage may vary. I replaced my printer because I did not wanted to install binary blobs from HP/Samsung.
> Perhaps I haven’t found «the right distro»
I’d look at immutable or image-based offerings, which aims at low or no maintenance: Aeon Desktop, Universal Blue, Endless OS. There are reviews on sites like LWN.net
I don't know what you are doing but I have my Arch Linux running since about 2013. I needed to intervene a few times, I think 4 times in total but the base installation in from 2013, now nearly 13 years ago.
I share the same sentiment. I've had the same Arch install running since ~2016 and have been using Arch since about 2013 and the number of times I've needed to chroot from a live image is under 10 and were mostly related to systemd breaking things during an update which is pretty much entirely no longer an issue these days.
Compared to Windows-land where nuking and reinstalling the entire OS is a routine maintenance task, checking arch news to see if there's any manual intervention and running `pacman -Syu` is all I really ever think about.
That's pretty good, I'm jealous! The last time I reinstalled my OS (Slackware) from scratch was 2009, but I run into serious problems every couple of years when upgrading it to 'Slackware64-current' pre-release, because Slackware's package manager doesn't track dependencies and you can just install stuff in the wrong order: I usually don't upgrade the whole OS at once... just have to fix any .so link errors (I've got a script to pull old libraries from btrfs snapshots). I've even ended up without a working libc more than once! When you can't run any program it sure is useful that you can upgrade everything aside from the kernel without rebooting!
I'm not trying to "challenge" your experience, it's your experience. But mine is completely different so I'll offer it for anyone who might be reading along...
I've been using Linux at work and at home every day for 15 years and I think in that whole time I've only ever had to reinstall the OS due to system issues once.
(I ran an Ubuntu system update on my laptop while on low battery, and it died. The APT database was irrevocably fucked afterwards. I'm not even sure it's fair to blame the OS for this, it was a dumb thing for me to do. I would also not be at all surprised if it's possible to fuck up a Windows installation in a similar manner).
Nowadays I run NixOS and yes that requires quite regular attention. But I've also used Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian extensively and all of them are just completely stable all the time.
(Only exception I can think of: Ubuntu used to have issues with /boot getting full which was a PITA).
> once a year I have to reinstall the os because it craps out for various reasons.
I don't know what distribution you're using, but something sounds very broken if you need to do this.
You mention the "right distro" but you did not mention what have you tried or with what you had problems with.
From my experience, some examples: for gentoo you are much more than a janitor - you must be everything all the time; for redhat based - you can get a major headache with some version upgrades; for arch (currently using, same install from 7 years) - update monthly and I had very few and minor issues
When I use Windows, I feel like a product, not a consumer. There's always macOS.
Which is shockingly bad in its own way. For having a tightly integrated hardware stack, Apple sure has managed to trash their desktop OS. Reminds me a lot of Windows in the xp => vista stage.
My read is they don't really give a shit about it anymore because the revenue comes from mobile/tablets. Same reason Microsoft is comfortable trashing windows... the revenue is coming from O365 & Azure now. The OS is a loss leader to sell those, and it definitely feels like it these days.
Once a company eats from the fruit of the "ads" tree... they tend to degrade into "awful" from the user side, because the user stops being the primary customer - the conflict of interest there is unavoidable.
Apple is tucking in... https://ads.apple.com/
re: on feeling like a janitor
I tried running various Linux distros on my desktop some years ago and definitely agree on the crap-out experience and having to reinstall. Eventually settled on macOS and it's been okay.
The game changer for me has been Nix. It works on macOS. I have had coworkers use it on Ubuntu. I am soon planning to switch to NixOS.
People complain about the syntax but honestly AI gets you around that. You will still do janitorial work, but you mostly only need to do it once.
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LLMs have made it so much easier thankfully. The janitorial overhead was a nightmare pre-2024.
Shameless self promotion, but I 80% vibe- coded a pip package for interfacing with LLMs right from the terminal. ‘pip install lask’. It has helped me a lot since it works from the terminal regardless of what the graphics drivers are doing.
I've been using Fedora and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my laptop and desktop respectively. Both are going around a year, and I haven't had major issues with them.
Looking at the logs I installed Fedora 35 on this laptop over 4 years ago when I got it and have upgraded through to 43 with no serious issues aside from some mDNS configuration that I had to fix.
I agree that it’s not quite grandma-safe but I’d like to know which distros you’re using that can’t even last a year.
I had my 80 year old mom on Linux Mint for 15 years, from about 62-78, and she didn't even know it. She tried to show me her Windows with exactly one problem 15 years in, and I was present with the Mint boot screen. Problem at that point was her laptop, not Mint. Grandmas tend to do very simple things, and the OS can just chug along forever without problems.
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> janitor
Perfect analogy. I'm using Debian for a few months now on my main laptop, and everything is flawed. Seriously, everything.
- Hybrid graphics simply doesn't work. The exception is when it works. Don't even try Wayland with it.
- Graphics card handling is still full with race conditions. It's random when everything works as intended without manual intervention.
- Switching monitors is pain. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Waking up my laptop with a new monitor plugged in is a gamble.
- Energy efficiency was bad with hybrid graphics, but since I had to turn it off, I don't even try to optimize it since.
- It was a pain to make my laptop speakers work. A lot of searching, and applying random fixes until one worked (in reality two fixes together).
- My main bluetooth headset has a feature to mute itself, or stop the music when it's not on my head. Guess which is the only device which I have that have a problem with this? The funny thing is, that it's a random even again. The sound comes back about 10% of the time fully. In another 10% of the time, the sound from some apps comes back, in others doesn't. In the other 80%, I had to reconnect it.
- Don't even talk about printers. It's a gamble, again. Some printers worked at some point in time, some simply don't work, and never will, because nobody cares about them anymore enough.
- Game performance is simply worse than on Windows. First of all, it wasn't trivial to force some games to use my GPU when I had hybrid graphics. The internet is full with outdated information. But even after that, my FPS is consistently worse. I heard some others who have the opposite experience. But this tells me again, that the whole thing is a gamble. Probably it's also a gamble on the game.
- When I press the power off button to put it to sleep, or initiate a normal shutdown, I need to force shutdown the whole laptop. Sometimes I get a notification that text editor is preventing shutdown, and whether I want to force quit it, but it doesn't matter which I clicked, and the "it will be force quit in 60 seconds if I don't select something" is a lie, the whole X framework is killed after a few seconds, and the laptop remains powered on, with the lie "the computer will be shutdown now" in terminal. This happens even when I don't get notification about that something would prevent power off. The shutdown initiation from the OS menu is working, and closing the lid put it to sleep.
And this is my current laptop. I simply couldn't use my previous one with Linux, because some stupid problem with the video card, which I couldn't solve in months. Even installation was a challenge.
I've used Linux in the past 25 years from time to time. It's getting better, but still a long way. You need some janitorial work also with Windows, especially nowadays, but it's still way better experience to click on "leave me alone" once a month, than this constant tinkering, and daily annoyance. I want to build things, not fix things which should just work.
Same here. I recently bought one laptop that I researched to make sure it was supported in Linux, and it had a ton of issues the reviewers didn't mention. So I bought a different laptop with Linux shipped from the factory, and it's better, but still has issues.
I recently installed Debian instead of Ubuntu on my laptop. Although I recognize many of your problems as "you need to know the right way to configure that or it's super annoying" - which sucks but is not impossible to overcome -, I also find that Debian is much more bug filled as a laptop OS than Ubuntu. I was actually extremely surprised by this. I didn't think Ubuntu was doing much of anything.
That said I am running Debian Trixie using wayland / kde / cups / nvidia / etc and do not have any of your problems my graphics work, my printers work, my bluetooth works, sleep works. They all required a lot more configuration than the last several versions of Ubuntu had required (which shouldn't be the case if there is better example just right next door), but none are persistent.
I personally have had a better experience with printers on linux than windows, but again it's always a gamble. I get it.
I think Bluetooth and printers are broken on pretty much every OS (especially on old devices), I certainly didn't have a better experience on Windows, it's maybe even worse.
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What? I have been using Linux daily for almost 20 years. I have typically only installed the OS fresh once each time. I've been using Fedora as my daily driver for well over a decade. I can't remember having to re-install a distro unless I was switching distros. My current system was installed in 2019, Fedora 30. Over a dozen painless upgrades, the last several of which have had Steam flatpak installed with no breakages.
Fully open source drivers using AMD video cards. It just works (minus the early x11/wayland debacle, I had to switch back to x11 for a while).
> it craps out for various reasons.
What does that even mean though? Under what circumstances? In what way?
> working professionally on Linux for many years.
Not enough to say which distribution... or do you mean you do kernel development work?
> Originally Wine, then Proton, now Bazzite make it super easy to game natively.
For many people, this is called "barely working at all." And as I get older I am becoming one of those people so quickly.
I agree, this is why I also consider Windows barely working, I had to install 7 then 8 then 10 then 11 what's next? It should just turn on and work stop changing it around and making me install different random crap to get it working.
I've observed that most "enthusiasts" are really just brand ambassadors. They've been captured by some proprietary software that doesn't run on Linux, and that's the problem of Linux. The day their set of products runs perfectly on Linux is the day Linux will be ready for them.
I think that if affinity chooses to make it work well on linux that would be a game changer for a lot of people. daVinci resolve works on linux for video so having a proper photo editor/illustrator tool that is not gimp would open up the option for most people to daily drive it. that's really the missing piece.
> I've observed that most "enthusiasts" are really just brand ambassadors.
Well said, and in the tech community that's predominantly Apple. We need to change this.
I mean, yes. That's how people work: They don't care about the OS for itself, the OS is a means to run the software they want to run, and it'll be ready when it runs that software.
(I'm typing this on my Linux desktop right now... but also have a separate Windows PC for running the games I want to run that don't work on Linux yet. When they work, I'll be thrilled to put Linux on that machine or its successor.)
Big fan of Linux. Use various distros daily.
That said, tech folk routinely underestimate how much they rely on their own technical skill. Try using Linux for a week without ever opening a terminal. Terminal is a "f this I'm going back to Windows" button for most people.
>but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windows
Many games refuse to run in VM, even if that VM is windows one. I bet there is a trick to bypass, but then you are at risk of being banned or can't receive support when needed.
I used to believe, until 2005 thereabouts, then I got tired.
Plus I never been that FOSS religious, any system with some POSIX compatibility is good enough for me.
> Weirdly enough, MacOS in a VM is a huge pit
That isn't weird. It's by design. MacOS is only designed to run on Apple hardware, and a VM, even if the host is Apple hardware isn't really Apple hardware.
(cue nitpicking) Can Okular sign a damn pdf with a pfx certificate yet or do I still need a PhD to set that up? MS office has an online version now but it is arguably very ass and Libreoffice is not even worth a mention, using it feels like time travelling twenty years back.
Linux would be the desktop of choice years ago if anything from Adobe or Office actually worked on it, the two things that make the world go round. Valve has done their part to develop Proton, but there is no equal push for things people can't do work without.
Try OnlyOffice. It is more polished than Libreoffice and can sign pdfs.
I remember when I first started reading HN how disappointed I was to see so many comments shitting on Linux and/or FOSS. I was kind of shocked because this is exactly the group that should be evangelizing this stuff. At the end of the day I realized I’m willing to put up with some inconvenience in exchange for freedom, but most people just aren’t.
The amount of hate spewed at FOSS is astounding really. People are literally giving you shit for free. Chill out.
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